Carburetor

The carburetor is the part of the motor that accurately mixes the appropriate mixture of fuel and air and feeds it to the engine. All carburetors do this seemingly simple action, but it's not as simple as it sounds. Most carbs (carburetors) have several jets, valves and other small moving pieces all which must act in perfect harmony make this process possible. over time build up of crud and debris "clog" these small moving pieces making them not work properly. My carb although seemed to work ok it defiantly needed some care. 

So I took my carb off for a good and thorough cleaning and problems started as soon as I took it off the intake manifold. First the gasket materialized as soon as the carb came off so I had to take a special tool and scrape of the remaining gasket.

As you can see from the pictures the area where this gasket was cleaned up quite nicely. But all this left me without a gasket for the carburetor to the manifold. So I am going to have to make a new gasket. Making this gasket will be covered in a latter post.

Once apart the carb looked actually more simple than most other I have dealt with. For actually cleaning it what I do is take it in sections. because there are too many small pieces you can't really just take it all apart at once. What you do is take a needle valve or some other small part out take it apart, clean it then put it back together and reattach it to carb body. To clean it I can do several things, first I can spray it with a chemical the chemical is called carb cleaner. If this doesn't work I can gently clean parts by rubbing them with steel wool to almost sand of the crud.

If neither of these strategies works I leave the parts to soak in gas over night to loosen up the all of the build up. After it's soaking I will then go and use one of the previously mentioned strategies to remove the remaining crud.

When I was taking apart parts of the float bowl I came across this jet. It was so heavily corroded that typically I would have just gone and ordered a new one from  a local small engine shop. But they wouldn't carry parts for this carb. So I spent much time and effort to get the jet even close to being usable. And more time, effort and carb cleaner to get it to passably usable. I couldn't get it any cleaner so I said it was good enough and reinstalled the jet.